When The Infinite Fulness is Poured Forth

Referenced by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in his April 2013 talk, "Lord, I Believe":

"When the infinite fulness is poured forth, as it ever is in Christ, it is not the oil that is stayed, but the vessels which fail. He giveth richly, inexhaustibly, but not mechanically; there is only one condition, the moral one of the presence of absolute faith."
-Edersheim, Alfred (1825-1889), The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Book IV, Chapter II - On the Morrow of the Transfiguration

Date Overlap Logic 2

The information here is not as good as the answer provided here, or this stackoverflow answer.

Motivation to Climb

Your goal is to get every one of them to climb to the top of Everest.

A rare few have so much faith in you that telling them you're going to help them be able to climb to the top of the world will be all the motivation they need.

But for most of them, if you tell them what your ultimate goal is for them, you'll fail before you even start. Just get them to the top of a hill. Then a higher hill. Then climb to the ridge of a lower peak. Before they know it, they will appreciate your companionship more than enough to compensate for the fatigue and hardship. Once you leave, they will go on to scale higher and higher peaks, just for the thrill of becoming like you, and remembering what it was like to climb with you. And the ones who don't make it to Everest you will find either at the summits of other mountains or else helping others to climb just as you helped them.

Questions and Answers

Nothing is more exhilarating that realizing the answer to a question you've had for a long time, except maybe realizing the question to an answer you've had for a long time.

Don't Be Paralyzed

If you determine to sit still, paralyzed until every question is answered and every whisper of doubt resolved, you will never move because in this life there will always be some issue pending or something yet unexplained.

-D. Todd Christofferson

You have more choices and more opportunities than ever before. Like so many things in life, this is both a blessing and a curse. Too many choices and the fear of making bad decisions often lead to decision paralysis, which is one of the challenges of your generation.

-Randall L. Ridd

My Response to Greg Trimble

Below is my response to Greg Trimble's blog post: "Well... Maybe the Book of Mormon is true after all."

"Faith" would not be "faith" if it were obvious and apparent to everyone. One of my favorite scriptures is Isaiah 45:15: "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour."

There are many who will only believe in what they can readily see and observe, and who believe that humankind is on the verge of knowing, understanding, and explaining everything. It is indeed exciting to hear of new technologies, new research, and new discoveries that broaden our view of our world/history/galaxy/universe. But in my opinion, all the knowledge that we as humans currently have doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what we do not understand and know.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when we say, "I know the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God, and that Thomas S. Monson is His living prophet today," the word "know" means that we know spiritually, rather than know because of undisputed evidence and scientifically proven facts. I suppose you could say we believe in a different kind of "knowing." This may sound like a cop-out, but we should remember that at one time people "knew" that the world was flat, "knew" that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and "knew" that our Galaxy was the only one in the universe.

I love these passages from the Book of Mormon. To me they are inspiring, and I do not believe they were made up by men, except a man inspired by a God who loves us as His children.

While God has hidden Himself, He does not leave us without strong evidences which must be dealt with, among which are the Testimony of Three Witnesses, and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses found at the beginning of the Book of Mormon. Of course arguments can be made against these witnesses, but they do have to be made. (And it gets more interesting when you find out that every one of the Three Witnesses turned against Joseph Smith and left the Church, yet none of them ever dared deny their testimony of the Book of Mormon, even at risk of great personal humiliation.)

Also, the rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beginning with Joseph Smith is similar to what Paul says to Agrippa in Acts 26:26 about Jesus' ministry, "This thing was not done in a corner." Much historical research has been done and will continue to be done surrounding the history of this church, and while some surprising things have been uncovered, nothing conclusive has come forward showing it clearly to be a fraud (the "Salamander Letter" in the 1980s purported to be such proof, but turned out to be fraudulent).

As for me, I choose to believe. I appreciate Greg's courage in sharing his thoughts and feelings.

Microsoft Word Mail Merge Tricks

I only do this once a year, and every year I have to re-learn how to do this. This year I'm using Microsoft Word 2010.

1. To create a new mail merge document, don't try to create the new document by clicking 'New'... and selecting labels and choosing a template. Just create a new, generic blank document, then click the 'Mailings' tab, then 'Labels.' The dialog below will be shown.
2. This isn't a basic tutorial on how to insert mail merge fields. You can search elsewhere for that. The screenshot below shows conditional code, which must be started by typing Ctrl-F9, which will insert the special curly code braces you will type your code in (those aren't just normal curly braces). For code braces nested inside code braces, you must type Ctrl-F9 again each time to insert them. The particular code shown below, looks at the value in field 'International,' and if it is not nothing ("") then it inserts a line break and then the value of the 'International' field, ELSE it inserts the value of field 'UnZip' without a line break. Note that to include the line break, we must enclose the 'true' portion of the IF statement in double quotes.

I can't take credit for figuring this out on my own, I'm just a persistent googler. One helpful YouTube video is here.

Always Remember Him

“Remembering the Savior” doesn’t mean that you have to think about Him every minute of every day. What it does mean is that you think about His example and teachings in the choices you make and always try to do His will and keep His commandments—to live as He would (From July 2014 New Era magazine. Link to source).

You Never Know

From President Gordon B. Hinckley's address "To The Women of the Church":

Many of you think you are failures. You feel you cannot do well, that with all of your effort it is not sufficient...

We all worry about our performance. We all wish we could do better. But unfortunately we do not realize, we do not often see the results that come of what we do.

I remember going to a stake conference in the East many years ago. On the plane coming home, I felt that I had been a total failure. I felt I had not touched anyone for good. I was miserable with a sense of inadequacy.

Then, some years later, I was at another conference in California. At the conclusion of the meeting a man came up to me and said, “You were at a conference a few years ago in such-and-such a place.”

“Yes,” I said, “I was there, and I remember the occasion.”

The man said: “You touched my heart. I came to that meeting out of curiosity. I really had no interest. I was on the verge of leaving the Church. But when it was announced that one of the Twelve Apostles would be there, I decided to go.

“You said something that started me to think. It touched me and stayed with me and stirred me. I decided to alter my course. I turned my life around. I am now living here in California. I have a good job, for which I am grateful. I hope I am a good husband and father. And I am now serving as a counselor in the bishopric of my ward. I am happier than I have ever been at any time in my life.”

I thanked him, and when I left him I said to myself, shaking my head: “You never know. You never know whether you do any good. You never know how much good you do.”

Splitting strings in SQL

Came across a great resource on splitting strings in SQL today by Aaron Bertrand here. I'm using the split by numbers approach. I noticed that when the last character(s) of the string being split is a delimiter, i.e. the last element would be NULL, the function chops off that last element. If only the function would accept the following IF logic somewhere:

if substring(@List,len(@list)-(len(@Delimiter)-1),len(@Delimiter)) = @Delimiter
SET @List = @List + @Delimiter

UPDATE
OK, I think this will work. See change highlighted in yellow. Testers wanted!

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SplitStrings_Numbers
(
@List NVARCHAR(MAX),
@Delimiter NVARCHAR(255)
)
RETURNS TABLE
WITH SCHEMABINDING
AS
RETURN
(
SELECT Item = SUBSTRING(@List, Number,
CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @List + @Delimiter, Number) - Number)
FROM dbo.Numbers
WHERE Number <= CONVERT(INT, LEN(@List)) +1
AND SUBSTRING(@Delimiter + @List, Number, LEN(@Delimiter)) = @Delimiter
);
GO

John 13:8

He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.
After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded...
Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou has no part with me.

I take it from this passage that unless we allow Christ to cleanse us and to serve us, we have no part with Him, and are not His. To be a Christian is to be continually asking for and relying upon God's help, more commonly called grace. In effect, we have all gone overboard and are walking on the water to Him; we are not sustained by our own power, but by His, according to our faith in Him. If we forget this, or if we start to worry about the wind and the waves, we will sink. The Lord allows this so that we can remember and learn by what power we have been brought hither.

You Are What You Do

From commencement address given by Terry R. Seamons on 24 April 2014:
    You are what you do;
    You do what you choose.
    If you don’t like what you are,
    Then change what you do.

What do you think? Is it really this simple?